More than 500 pieces of art and antiques from the Bernheimer dynasty of dealers went under the hammer at Sotheby’s this week, with mixed results.
The evening sale on 24 November, featuring Old Master paintings, ancient sculpture, textiles and furniture, fell far short of its estimated £3.7m to £5.5m, fetching £1.4m with buyer’s premium, or £1.1m without. Only 22 out of 42 lots found homes, giving a poor sell-through rate of 52.4%.
“There's been a tendency recently, particularly for Sotheby's, to do sales that are fundamentally dealers' stock dressed up as special opportunities,” said one anonymous Old Master dealer after the evening sale. “One would have been tempted to lower the prices and scatter the lots a bit. It’s suicidal to have a 40-lot sale of things.” The dealer noted that the day sale “looked different”, with some “amusing things in it”.
The day sale indeed did slightly better on 25 November, totalling £2.4m with buyer’s premium (£1.9m without) against an estimate of £1.5m-£2.3m. Of the 440 lots offered, 17 went unsold, giving a sell-through rate of 96.1%.
Highlights included four monumental Renaissance limestone columns said to have once supported the Ducal Palace in Mantua, which sold for £137,000 or £110,000 without premium (est £60,000-£80,000), and four German Classical figure reliefs from the 18th century, which flew above the £6,000 high estimate, going for £100,000 or £80,000 without premium.
Konrad Bernheimer, who runs the London-based gallery Colnaghi, decided to auction his family’s collection after turning 65 earlier this year. Colnaghi is changing hands next month when co-owner Katrin Bellinger retires and Bernheimer takes on new partners—Jorge Coll and Nicolás Cortés—through a merger with their Spanish gallery.
Konrad’s great-grandfather Lehmann Bernheimer started out trading from a small market stall in Munich in the mid-19th century and became one of the world’s leading antique dealers. The collection was seized by the Nazis when the next generation of the family was sent to Dachau concentration camp in 1938. They managed to negotiate their release and were exiled to Venezuela.
The family returned to Germany after the war and Lehmann’s son Otto began to rebuild the business after reclaiming the collection. In 1977, Konrad, then only 26, took over from his grandfather, focusing on Old Master paintings. For the past three decades the collection been housed in an 11th-century castle, Burg Marquartstein, which is also up for sale.
